Sidney Eyon hated being under the stars, but to go through the front door was to lose the element of surprise, so the rooftop it was. Tonight was a particularly clear night, the air crisp and cool and laden with autumn breezes. In spite of the light pollution welling up from the myriad streets and buildings of Philadelphia, it seemed the stars were innumerable overhead. He had gotten used to ignoring them, but on a cloudless night like this one he could feel their light, weak and watery as it was, burning like cold fire across the back of his neck, and hear the faint, mournful notes of lucent song drifting through the ether.
Sidney gave his head a quick shake to clear it. This wasn't the time to dwell upon the past. He knelt down on the rooftop and scribbled a quick diagram with a piece of chalk - an oddly asymmetrical design full of loops and whorls contained within sharp geometries. Ordinarily, he didn't need written foci to help him focus his spellwork, but if his suspicions were correct, he would need to conserve as much energy as possible.
The elegant swirls of chalk began to glow with a soft white light as he completed the glyph. He deliberately left it incomplete for the moment as he reached out with his senses down below. There - the thrum of ritual magic was unmistakable, and on top of it the cold, slick sheen of necromancy. Magic of the darkest sort, and it was approaching a crescendo.
He had been tracking this warlock for days - ever since the murder of the man a block away from his home, although nobody but him would have realized it as such. The man had fallen asleep in his bed and never woke up again. The coroners had deemed it a fluke event - the man's heart had simply stopped. Rare, to be sure, but there was no sign that anything unnatural was the cause. To Sidney's senses, however, the man's body had been virtually soaked in black magic, like a viscous cloud of ink that boiled up from every pore and dripped down to pool underneath the EMT's gurney. He hadn't even needed to look to know that a piece of the man was missing - a nail, in this case, scraped from the bed.
Ordinarily, Sidney might have left the murder for the Watchers, the wizards and witches who acted as lawkeepers of the supernatural. He didn't like to make a habit of involving himself in arcane matters that didn't directly concern him, but something about the man's death didn't sit well with him. A...peculiarity, about the way the black cloud of magic had roiled and writhed about the corpse, which rang an alarm in his head that had been silent for decades, if not centuries. So it was that he began keeping a closer eye, watching for the inevitable second murder.
As it turned out, the second murder hadn't been the second at all. It was the fifth.
Two points were enough to draw him a line, however, and that line led him here. The Mutter Museum, home of the odd, the twisted, and the deformed. Originally a collection of specimens and medical tools used for the advancement of science, the museum had grown since its origins in 1858 to a treasury of over 20,000 pieces. Ranging from tumors and cysts to conjoined twins and malformed fetuses to an entire wall of human skulls, the exhibits at the museum were a monument to the various ways that the human body could turn on itself.
What the museum curators didn't and couldn't know, however, was that each piece donated to the museum carried with it a certain spiritual resonance, a small spark of power left over as a result of the owner's demise. Individually, they were weak, almost trivial, but so many pieces gathered together coalesced the power into something vastly more significant. Someone inside the museum was attempting to tap into that power now, and Sidney had a strong conviction it was for a reason that would end badly for everyone.
Satisfied that the ritual was reaching a critical point, Sidney infused his glyph with a bit of will, allowing the magic to take shape. The stone of the building rippled for a moment as though made of water. Then, with a soft, sibilant hiss, a small hole appeared in the rooftop. It grew steadily and rapidly, expanding until it was roughly the size of a manhole cover, then stopped, leaving a perfectly round entrance into one of the main chambers below. Immediately, the chill of necromantic magic boiled forth, acrid and cloying as a plume of cold smoke.
Sidney peered down into the hole. The exhibit was one of the permanent ones - a large rectangular chamber perhaps fifty or sixty feet by forty feet and split into two levels. The top level was lined with wooden display cases lined with glass, featuring antique medical devices, old documents, and one section affixed with hundreds of human skulls. A velvet carpeted walkway ran the perimeter of the top level, broken at the far end by a staircase that ran down into the ground floor. The displays there, both against the wall and free standing, consisted of malformed bones, misshapen fetuses in jars, and entire articulated skeletons of varying ages. On this floor, a man was kneeling in the aisle between two free standing display cases. Lines and sigils drawn onto the floor ran from him like spider webs, crawling up the stairs and along the second floor walkway. They pulsed with a sickly purple light that cast the room in an eerie light and highlighted the macabre air of the exhibit hall.
Rendering the man unconscious from the rooftop would be a simple matter. Even as Sidney prepared the spellwork, however, he recognized some of the glyphs looping around the room, and he dispersed his casting with a curse. A lattice of magic had been built into the room, shielding the man from direct attack. Moreover, it had been suffused with sufficient energy that if the ritual was disrupted in any way, the resultant explosion would likely obliterate everything with three blocks. The man had clearly anticipated company.
Sidney considered this for a moment. It was a foolish man who charged into a situation when he had not only been expected, but preparations made for his arrival.
"Fortunately," he whispered, "I'm not really a man."
Gathering the edges of his coat, he leapt through the hole, landing with catlike grace onto one of the second floor walkways. Although he made less sound than an owl taking flight, the man looked up the instant he arrived.
"Ah, you," he said. The warlock was young, no more than twenty two or twenty three, with a mop of shaggy black hair and horn-rim glasses. He was dressed in a simple white button-down shirt and khaki pants, his feet bare and stained with a dark liquid. His hands, too, were encrusted with some substance that appeared black by the ghostly purple light of the sigils snaking out from under his feet. He looked haggard, even exhausted, but his eyes glittered like the ocean surface under a full moon.
"Yes, me," Sidney replied. "If you were expecting company it wouldn't have hurt to freshen up a mite, no?"
"They told me you'd come," the warlock replied, swaying slightly as he stared up at Sidney. "They told me that only you would recognize the signs."
Sidney felt a chill run down his spine, but he kept his voice nonchalant as he walked around the perimeter of the room toward the stairs.
"It's so wonderful to have my talents recognized," he said drily, running hand along the railing as he walked. The metal was cold and seemed to buzz underneath his fingers. "If you wanted to play at necromancy, however, shouldn't you have found a nice crowded graveyard? I'll admit the aesthetics of this place is much more pleasing than some mossy tombstones, but you'd have found much stronger resonance."
"But not the resonance they need," the warlock replied. "It's twisted, here. Everything is twisted. Nothing here should ever have been, and that is what they need." Then, unexpectedly, he looked up at the hole in the ceiling. "Does it ever bother you, being watched every night by the corpses of your brothers?"
Sidney almost tripped and fell, so great was his shock. Only a handful of entities on the planet knew his background as something more than just a powerful magician. None of them, he was certain, would have given that information to a twenty-something hipster warlock. Not for any price he would be able to pay. There was only one other source of information the boy could have accessed. If that were true, the boy was less than a pawn - he was a tool and nothing more. The damage to his mind was likely already irreparable.
"Oh, they're no more my actual brothers than the painting of a man is the subject himself," he heard himself saying as he scrambled to recover, "but I suppose the difference is largely academic at this point."
The warlock nodded, as if Sidney had confirmed something he had suspected all along.
"You don't look very much like a star," he said, after a moment.
"I do hate being recognized in the streets," Sidney replied. "Paparazzi, you understand. So annoying."
"What was the word they used?" the warlock mused to himself. "Sidereal. That's what they called you."
"Tell me, what did they offer you?" Sidney asked. "What was the carrot they waved under your nose for you to play obedient little puppet?"
The warlock hesitated, then said, "They said they could bring her back. Death doesn't exist for them. They're not bound by it and never have been. All they would need is...the heart of a star."
"You poor, foolish boy," Sidney said, his voice cold. "Yes, they could give you what they promised, with or without my heart, but you would regret it to the end of your days. Which would be soon, if you were lucky."
"You can't hurt me here," the warlock said. "The neighborhood would burn if you even tried."
"I don't want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Your little ward can't shield you forever. Stop now and perhaps you can still walk away from this."
"You can't hurt me," the warlock repeated, "but I can hurt you."
He lifted his hands. Dark purple flames danced into life above his outstretched fingers, and the sigils underneath his feet grew incandescent. Violet lightning surged from his fingertips, forking dozens, then hundreds of times, shattering the glass in the display cases as they raked across the walls of the exhibit. Sidney shouted a single word and hurled himself to one side, one arm pointed forward with all five fingers splayed. A transparent hemisphere of pale blue light sprang into existence directly in front of him, and the lightning bolts splashed against it in a cascade of brilliant purple sparks.
Even as Sidney got to his feet, however, it became apparent that the bolts aimed at him were largely a cursory effect. With a clattering noise like a wave of falling dominoes, the bones from the exhibits flew toward the center of the room, skulls and femurs and hip bones tearing themselves from the walls in a chorus of splintering sounds. They coalesced around the warlock, each bone piece adhering to one another as though stuck together by some mysterious gravity, growing rapidly in size until there was a misshapen mound of broken bones twenty feet high in the middle of the room. Purple fire exploded into being around the bone mound, igniting it in an amethyst pyre that sent noxious black smoke boiling up toward the ceiling.
Then, slowly, the burning mound of bone turned toward Sidney and howled.
Sidney stared at the monstrosity for a moment, then sighed.
"Well. Shit."
***********************
Still too long. Still need to use a timer.
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